What's New in Silverlight 5? - Performance and Other Improvements


Introduction

In this article, we'll have a brief discussion of the performance, networking, and other improvements in Silverlight 5.

Performance

Performance has been improved in Silverlight 5 in a number of ways:

  • Significant improvement in performance through the entire product
  • Startup performance has been improved using a multi-core background JIT compiler
  • XAML parsing time has been improved especially for UserControl and ResourceDictionary
  • Added 64-bit runtime version. Not in beta
  • Hardware accelerated rendering in Internet Explorer 9 in windowless mode

Networking

And networking has its share of improvements:

  • Network latency has been improved significantly
  • 90% performance improvements in ClientHttpWebRequest scenarios

Services

Added support for WS-Trust in WCF. (WS-Trust is a specification aimed to improve security and validation.)

Profiling and Testing

  • Automated UI testing
  • Improved profiling support:
     
    • Memory
    • CPU
    • Thread contention

Other

  • Support for Windows Azure
  • In-Browser HTML support
  • Many more fixes and improvements throughout the product

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